Comments by "Laurence Fraser" (@laurencefraser) on "Rick Beato" channel.

@rickchyczewski576 Almost anyone can sing. Singing well enough to make money is another story, and well enough to make a carreer out of it is a different matter again (
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@astridkjellberg If you limit yourself to pop music, it mostly does. That whole '90% of everything put out by the big record lables in English was written by the same two guys' issue.
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There's money in origional material as a solo act (if perhaps not as much as there might once have been unless you combine it with other things). As a band? seems like the money there is being hired by the solo guys and/or as the 'house' band to do all the backing/backup/whatever work for a bunch of different people.
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@youreallygotmenow4855 Nah, it's entirely believeable. I'd give good odds they requested specific Songs, not the Bands, though. Also, the copyright black hole means that a lot of content creators (streamers and youtubers, but also video game developers) use older music (either actually old, or at least old enough that copyright law wasn't busted enough to functionally create a cultural dark age yet at the time it was published), so those older genres become popular again too.
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@davidbyers1151 The record companies also used to straight up be loan sharks engaging in what amounted to wage theft and fraud against the bands the vast majority of the time. Most bands would end up living off ever increasing loans that they could never pay back. It was set up such that lables often wouldn't even bother keeping track of what they were supposed to be paying the artists and/or how much of the loan (because the money they gave artists when they were signed was never a bonus, it was a Loan) had been paid back unless they tought said artists would make it big right out the gate, and it mostly didn't matter unless one unexpectedly DID make it big because the whole thing was set up such that the artist's cut would never be enough to both live on and cover the costs of doing their job as singers/musicians, so they'd have to borrow more from the lable, and paying that back would eat up more of their cut, until in practice what was actually happening was that the lable wasn't so much paying the talents as including a 'talent expenses' line in their own accounting book. The flip side of this was that when the artists quit, that same 'accounting system' meant that they couldn't really force the artists to pay back the remaining outstanding debt most of the time, but still. Seriously, the record lable would take half the income, then charge you for using all of their facilities and services out of Your cut (I think they paid for advertising and actually making and shipping the physical records/tapes/CDs? not much else though) then take another chunk of Your cut to pay off that initial bonus (loan) you got when you signed with them... you got what was left... Except, as noted, they wouldn't actually keep track of the loans properly, most of the time, just perpetually take a chunk of your cut to theoreically pay them off, forever. I'm lead to believe they got better somewhere along the way, but that used to be standared behaviour for quite a while.
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Seems like the trick to getting people to know you exist in music is the same as getting people to know you exist on twitch: Make it big somewhere else first.
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@vkngwmn6636 'music makes people think'... well, it makes some people think. A whole lot of people 'just like the beeps and the boops' and have no awareness of the lyrics (not helped by the tendency towards 'music' that has so much base that the lyrics (and often everything else) are utterly incomprehensible and not actually providing them in text form anywhere actually convenient to find).
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To be fair, recording contracts were frequently a straight up scam that amounted to wage theft, back in the day.
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